The first stream that FIRST did this year at the Lake Superior Regional has been taken down by Twitch because it has been 60 days since the stream aired. Lucky for FIRST, I have downloaded, split and uploaded the match videos. They are available here.
Currently I am only uploading the quad view videos because of YouTube’s upload limit, but I will upload the single view videos later (probably in the summer). I will keep uploading the events and publicizing them as the streams are taken down each week until either FIRST starts archiving them themselves, or I get through the whole season.
You’re welcome FIRST.
Note: If the audio is muted, that is because Twitch muted it because of copyright violation. And any monetization on the videos is because of copyrighted content in the videos.
I never realized the stream archives only hold the last 60 days. I’ll see about finding time this week to help with downloading and reuploading to YouTube. Hopefully we can save most of it.
That is probably the biggest caveat to the FIRST + Twitch deal. Twitch probably doesn’t want FIRST to upload to YouTube, a competing service, but doesn’t provide a similar archival service for match videos. It just makes the whole thing annoying in my mind because the biggest benefit of a volunteer based stream to teams is instantly uploaded match videos. Hopefully Twitch works something out in the future, but for now I hope people saved streams that already expired.
The one I mentioned above is the very first one to be removed and was removed today. One will be removed tomorrow, then we wait a week before two more are removed. I realized this problem a couple weeks ago and decided to download the streams just in case. So far I have all but the Las Vegas Regional, the 10,000 Lakes Regional and the single view videos from the Buckeye Regional. (I maxed out my family’s terabyte data plan for April, and am running out of space on my secondary hard drive :rolleyes: )
Central Valley and Arkansas Rock City will be removed next week (and Central Valley is currently uploading right now).
Because of AP Tests, I haven’t had much time to work on this. Central Valley is here. Some videos are missing because the stream was split into two or three during the day and there was a delay between them.
Arkansas Rock City should be up by the end of the week.
I’m one of the folks that worked on the new FRC Webcast Unit (beta). I wanted to let you know a few things going on:
[ul]
[li]We’ve added the videos from throughout the season to playlists that won’t expire after 60 days. You can find them at links like these:[LIST]
[/li][li]https://www.twitch.tv/firstinspires1/collections
[/li][li]https://www.twitch.tv/firstinspires2/collections
[/li][li]https://www.twitch.tv/firstinspires_turing/collections
[/li][li]etc…
[/li][/ul]
[li]We will be uploading every match captured from both truck routes and the championship match-by-match to the web using raw footage collected on-site (not transmitted via twitch) match-by-match. We are just waiting for the hard drives to come back from the road.
[/li][li]Please do not publish or rehost FIRST’s videos in any format. We hope to get our match-by-match uploads up very shortly.
[/li][/LIST]
Thank you, everyone, for your efforts (we know how exciting webcast videos are!) However, it’s important for our group, and the brand, to have control over the content, so we must ask that you not rehost our raw footage. Feel free to PM me if you have any questions!
This is not true at all. You can export to YouTube as an option on Twitch videos with one click and as Jacob stated you can place Twitch videos in collections if you want them to not expire. Twitch is focused on live events and offers archives for the time it feels is relevant for most of it’s content and then doesn’t have to pay for the storage (by default).
I believe that there is not a partnership contract between Twitch & FIRST but closer to a MOU (otherwise you would be able to subscribe). As a Twitch partner I can tell you that the only main caveat that we are supposed to adhere between Twitch and YouTube or other similar services is that we are not supposed to live stream on another platform. This is why FUN does not live stream on YouTube but archives on it.
I went around and talked to a lot of people during champs that were involved with streaming in some form and nothing indicated that FIRST planned on uploading the videos. From what I understand, there are most likely no local recordings and there was no clear initiative from FIRST to make sure that the matches made it to YouTube. That last part is what makes me believe that whatever agreement Twitch and FIRST had prevented them from uploading to YouTube. Other sources have clearly come through to make sure that a majority of the matches were uploaded as you can tell by looking at TBA. I’m not making definite claims, just putting various tidbits that I heard together. I can’t know the whole picture because even most of the people I talked to didn’t.
EDIT: I did not notice Jacob’s post above (he is also not one of the people I talked to), which proves a lot of my claims to be false. I’m happy to see FIRST push to do better in this field, but clearly people weren’t well informed and this information would have been nice to know beforehand. However there still should have been a push for match videos to be uploaded instantly to some easy to search medium (imo YouTube+TBA should be that medium), which is why a lot of other people spent the time and effort to get them on YouTube+TBA. Instant uploads are a big game changer to any live stream because teams can quickly review footage after they finish and people that missed a match don’t have to scrub through a very long video to find the one they missed. There are a few great tools like Ty’s and mine that can do the job as long as there is bandwidth, which I’m pretty sure there is considering each stream was probably maxed out at about 3.5 to 5 Mbps and a gigabit upload connection could support more than enough outgoing streams at once. Hopefully FIRST considers this for the future.
